Program Notes
Guest speakers: Matthew Markert and Frank Sacco
Year this lecture was recorded: 2017
For Marijuana Month, this week is our Cannabis “Paradox” Pair o’ Docs episode.
Dr. Matthew Markert shares thoughts about cannabis, epilepsy and the brain. As an MD/PhD interested in altered states of consciousness, he chose epilepsy as a way to study unusual states of the brain. You can email him at stanfordneuromed (at) gmail (dot) com.
Then we hear from Frank Sacco, a doctoral student in Clinical Psychology at William James College, who works with his father to create an online healing community for people wishing to explore the altered state of consciousness induced by cannabis for healing. Learn about their work and share your own story on their site Virtual Healing Communities.
Thanks to Robert Heinlein for the Pair O’ Docs joke in ‘Number of the Beast.’
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from Cyberdelic Space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in Psychedelic Salon
00:00:23 ►
2.0.
00:00:23 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in Psychedelic Salon 2.0.
00:00:31 ►
And today, Lex Pelger will be continuing with a series of discussions about my favorite plant, cannabis.
00:00:38 ►
His first guest today is Dr. Matthew Marqueret, whose work also involves studying epilepsy,
00:00:41 ►
and that also holds a great deal of interest for me. You see, my mother was epileptic, and in fact, at the moment
00:00:45 ►
of my birth, she experienced a grand mal seizure and almost died. So having lived as a child,
00:00:51 ►
worrying about my mother’s health, well, it gives me great joy to know that today, well, at least in
00:00:57 ►
a few places here in the U.S., some people who suffer from epilepsy are gaining a degree of relief through the use of cannabis.
00:01:11 ►
I feel that I should add, however, that even though 83% of adults in the states now favor legalization of cannabis, according to U.S. federal law,
00:01:16 ►
it’s still a class one felony in every city and state in the land.
00:01:21 ►
Unfortunately, the 17% of the people who don’t favor legalization are either very religious or happen to be in positions of power of one kind or another,
00:01:30 ►
and keeping cannabis illegal is still a very lucrative business for the prison, police, and drug testing industries,
00:01:45 ►
drug company lobbyists who bribe the politicians to continue to enforce laws that prevent the public from obtaining a low-cost, non-patentable form of medicine. But alas, progress still
00:01:53 ►
continues to be made every day. And part of that progress comes from the work of dedicated
00:01:59 ►
professionals like the two gentlemen that Lex Pelger is bringing to the salon here today.
00:02:04 ►
So now, here’s Lex.
00:02:06 ►
For Marijuana Month here on the Psychedelic Salon 2.0,
00:02:10 ►
today we feature interviews with not one, but two doctors.
00:02:14 ►
That makes this our Cannabis Paradox Parodox show.
00:02:19 ►
And thank you to Robert Heinlein for that joke.
00:02:22 ►
I talked with Dr. Matt Markert when he came over to help with scanning for the Psychedelic History Project,
00:02:27 ►
along with his partner and their pet parrot, Anzac.
00:02:31 ►
By the way, the Instagram to follow the history is at the Psychedelic History Project.
00:02:36 ►
And to follow the adventures of their African gray parrot, that’s at Anzac the parrot.
00:02:42 ►
And just for the record, the parrot has a third more followers than me.
00:02:47 ►
And I can see why.
00:02:49 ►
Anyway, my talk with Matt was fascinating,
00:02:53 ►
because while he’s a trained MD-PhD in neurochemistry research,
00:02:57 ►
he’s most interested in altered states of consciousness.
00:02:59 ►
And there’s no program to study anything quite like that.
00:03:04 ►
So he chose to focus on epilepsy, because it’s a widely recognized clinical form of unusual brain states.
00:03:10 ►
And anyone who’s read about temporal lobe epilepsy will see why it’s so fascinating.
00:03:14 ►
If you’re curious to learn more, one great source is the book Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks.
00:03:20 ►
So with Matt’s focus on epilepsy, he naturally hears a lot from parents and patients and advocates like myself with very high expectations.
00:03:29 ►
And so he shares with us a medical doctor’s nuanced perspective on the use of cannabinoids with epileptic children.
00:03:37 ►
It was quite an enjoyable conversation in Bruce Dahmer’s barn, while Anzac the parrot looked on and occasionally offered encouragement.
00:03:43 ►
while Anzac the Parrot looked on and occasionally offered encouragement.
00:03:47 ►
Another engaging conversation follows with Frank Sacco,
00:03:51 ►
who I originally met at the Cannabis World Congress and Business Expo in New York City.
00:03:55 ►
He’s a doctoral student in clinical psychology at William James College, who works closely with his father, also named Frank Sacco.
00:04:01 ►
Frank’s father has been a leader in the field of using altered states of consciousness for healing,
00:04:08 ►
and he worked with the famed Dr. Stanley Krippner himself now the SACOs are creating an online healing community
00:04:12 ►
for people wishing to explore the healing available from altered states of consciousness
00:04:16 ►
induced by cannabis
00:04:17 ►
as well as many other methods
00:04:19 ►
you can learn from them and share your own story
00:04:22 ►
at virtualhealingcommunities.org
00:04:24 ►
so on with the show and I hope you enjoy this paradox You can learn from them and share your own story at virtualhealingcommunities.org.
00:04:28 ►
So on with the show, and I hope you enjoy this paradox.
00:04:34 ►
Hello, everybody.
00:04:38 ►
This is the Psychedelic Salon 2.0, and I’m very happy to be here with Dr. Matthew Markert.
00:04:39 ►
Hi, Lex.
00:04:40 ►
Hey.
00:04:41 ►
Thanks for having me. Thanks for having me, and thanks for helping with the Psychedelic History Project today.
00:04:44 ►
Yeah, man.
00:04:44 ►
This is great.
00:04:45 ►
It’s like a little smorgasbord of who knows what.
00:04:48 ►
I mean some of it is newspaper clips with archived numbers and stuff and it’s very systematic and other things.
00:04:55 ►
It’s like you can tell whoever was putting it together had an idea they didn’t tell anyone about.
00:04:58 ►
We’re just looking at it later.
00:05:01 ►
Well, despite being a doctor with lives to save, he is here helping today.
00:05:07 ►
And I wanted to ask first about what brought you to being a physician.
00:05:13 ►
Oh, sure.
00:05:15 ►
So I started out being interested in the mind and interested in information.
00:05:24 ►
And as a matter of convenience, I just went into it through
00:05:27 ►
engineering and computer systems. And then I got hurt pretty bad. And I was in a diving accident.
00:05:34 ►
I crushed my C5 in three places and I was paralyzed from the chest down or from the
00:05:40 ►
collarbone down. And I had some experiences there as a patient that helped me understand what should happen and what things could be like.
00:05:48 ►
And I had a couple of doctors.
00:05:50 ►
And again, at this point in my life, I didn’t really know what I was doing.
00:05:52 ►
Honestly, I was spending most of my time in college not going to class and watching adults swim with my friends.
00:05:58 ►
Like that is how I was spending most of my time.
00:06:01 ►
And I was really kind of searching for a reason to do stuff. And I was really just still
00:06:06 ►
showing up to class sort of, um, and I kind of had what Samuel Jackson said, alcoholics referred
00:06:15 ►
to as a moment of clarity, which is, um, cause I didn’t know if I was going to get better and I
00:06:20 ►
didn’t know, um, what was going to happen. And,. And I had this vision of being pushed around in a wheelchair by Cub Scouts five years in the future, like I had done for handicapped people when I was younger.
00:06:33 ►
And that kind of bugged me out.
00:06:37 ►
And so I said, I know what I’m going to do.
00:06:38 ►
I’m going to get better.
00:06:39 ►
And I’m going to put myself in a position where I can help prevent people from having to be tortured by not knowing the answer to that question.
00:06:46 ►
And I’ll become a physician.
00:06:47 ►
I’ll become a research physician.
00:06:48 ►
I’ll work in neurology and paralysis and trying to prevent that.
00:06:57 ►
And then I hit the patient-assisted medication delivery system button three or four times, and I went to sleep.
00:07:06 ►
And then I got out and took a course called Drugs and Human Behavior, which was basically a
00:07:13 ►
psychology course in physiology with my best friend. And it was all about the ways that
00:07:18 ►
drugs affect the body and the mind. I was living in a house with people who were doing drugs and I thought it looked a little scary.
00:07:28 ►
One of my friends was doing GHB and I said, I don’t know what that is, but I don’t like it.
00:07:31 ►
So I’m going to find out what that is.
00:07:32 ►
So I took a class.
00:07:34 ►
And as a result of that class and a result of my injury, I said, I know what I want to do now.
00:07:37 ►
I’m going to be a doctor.
00:07:40 ►
And he became, he and I both made that the same decision.
00:07:42 ►
And he ends up going to Palmer Chiropractor school and open a practice in Philadelphia.
00:07:45 ►
And I am now completing my clinical neurophysiology fellowship and it just took a while.
00:07:50 ►
So that’s how, um, that’s how that happened.
00:07:53 ►
Uh, the, um, interesting part was that I had, since I had spent the first couple of years,
00:08:00 ►
not really doing well and making the decision that you want to be a doctor when you
00:08:05 ►
have a gpa of 1.9 is not the easiest thing to do and i had a lot of people telling me
00:08:11 ►
you should stay in research which is what i was doing at the time um you know so then that story
00:08:18 ►
gets longer if i tell it that way but that’s you know that’s how i became a doctor is i got hurt
00:08:22 ►
i had a refocus of my priorities and my first real physiology exposure in the college level was on the subject of the interaction of various drugs of every kind.
00:08:36 ►
I mean, also antidepressants and things like that was really how the class was really about.
00:08:40 ►
But it was clear neurotransmitters was something I could really bite my teeth into.
00:08:44 ►
But it was clear neurotransmitters was something I could really bite my teeth into.
00:08:52 ►
And so on the path, how did your current specialization get more clear to you as you move forward?
00:08:53 ►
So that’s a great question, too.
00:08:59 ►
So I’m presently a neurologist who subspecializes in epilepsy and clinical neurophysiology. That’s what I do every day.
00:09:01 ►
But that very easily could have been psychiatry. And in fact, when I applied to residencies, I applied to 12, 13 residencies in psychiatry.
00:09:10 ►
And I only threw on a few neurology ones at the end.
00:09:14 ►
And the reason is because I wanted to study the mind.
00:09:17 ►
But there’s no medical training in consciousness.
00:09:23 ►
And the question for me was just, how do I want to get there? Do I want
00:09:27 ►
to get there by studying the symptoms, psychiatry and studying the methods? Or do I want to get
00:09:31 ►
there by studying the pathways? And there’s an old joke that goes, if you can, you know,
00:09:38 ►
if you can find the target in the brain, that is the place where the thing happens,
00:09:42 ►
that’s neurology. And if it’s not a psychiatry, I was, if I’m, if I wanted to study consciousness, there is no fellowship in
00:09:49 ►
consciousness. There’s no place to do that. So I had to ask myself, what is an outcome that I could
00:09:54 ►
study that I absolutely knew was happening? Even studying depression is hard. It’s subjective
00:10:00 ►
measures, right? And so seizure, which is the nature and the fundamental unit of studying epilepsy, is a thing you know happens.
00:10:08 ►
First of all, you can see it.
00:10:10 ►
Second, the person tells you they think they had one.
00:10:13 ►
Third, if you put an electroencephalogram on somebody in EEG, there is a definable set of agreed-upon characteristics which, when present, is what we say a seizure is.
00:10:23 ►
So you can do research on it it and it is a discrete outcome.
00:10:27 ►
And that is extremely important for me in order to determine whether I’m studying consciousness
00:10:31 ►
and knowing that what I’m studying is a thing that is happening and not just a subjective,
00:10:37 ►
I’m ascribing my own ideals to this.
00:10:40 ►
So I wanted to study consciousness in a way that I knew could be studied.
00:10:45 ►
So that’s how I found epilepsy.
00:10:48 ►
Because if what I want to do is to interact physically,
00:10:51 ►
using either the drugs that we use,
00:10:53 ►
or much more even bioelectric forms of control,
00:10:57 ►
to manage the consciousness,
00:10:59 ►
I need to know what the symptom was I was managing.
00:11:03 ►
Plus, there’s only really one place in the world
00:11:05 ►
if you want to do clinically supported medical grade research
00:11:11 ►
that involves information transfer with electrodes that go into the brain.
00:11:18 ►
There’s only two things that you can do.
00:11:20 ►
One is movement disorders.
00:11:22 ►
The other is epilepsy.
00:11:24 ►
And I’m not interested in movement disorders.
00:11:26 ►
So that’s how I found epilepsy.
00:11:29 ►
And so it probably was a huge range of displays that people have with epilepsy
00:11:35 ►
centralized in all these different parts of the brain.
00:11:38 ►
You probably get to see all of these different altered states.
00:11:40 ►
And instead of the altered states described by heads, which are dismissed as silliness,
00:11:47 ►
these are altered states that are accepted by the medical establishment as something,
00:11:53 ►
you know, strange, weird, and true. It’s so funny, man. Like I’ve, you know,
00:11:58 ►
I grew up and even through medical school thought a seizure was shaking on the ground, you know,
00:12:02 ►
arms back and forth, solid urinating. That’s what I thought a seizure was. And for some people it is, but the vast majority of them are not. They’re sitting there and they’re talking to you. And while they’re talking to you,
00:12:08 ►
they’re just have a little bit of a space between the things that they’re saying. And they’re having
00:12:13 ►
seizures during those spaces. Um, they don’t know what though they have, like, it might be more of a
00:12:17 ►
five or six or second, seven second gap, but that’s a seizure or their seizure is I’ve seen this where
00:12:23 ►
a young lady is sitting in bed and
00:12:27 ►
she’s on her ipad and she’s playing video games and she reaches forward and she grabs a big gulp
00:12:30 ►
and she’s drinking the big gulp and she just keeps drinking the big gulp and if you look closely on
00:12:35 ►
the video you can see the big gulp’s actually empty she started having a seizure and she has
00:12:40 ►
the seizures and the part of her brain that deals with craving and thirst so her her seizure is she craves it, but then she gets kind of stuck,
00:12:47 ►
and she’s not forming new memories.
00:12:48 ►
She doesn’t realize that she’s kept drinking,
00:12:50 ►
and she’s just sitting there continuing to drink her soda.
00:12:53 ►
It’s called periictal drinking.
00:12:55 ►
It’s fascinating, right?
00:12:57 ►
Well, throw into that the seizure in the part of the brain that deals with deja vu.
00:13:01 ►
Very common seizure is deja vu.
00:13:06 ►
Or the part that deals with deja vu very common very common seizure is deja vu um or the part that deals with little flashing lights or remembering a memory from before and
00:13:11 ►
it’s now we’re talking about consciousness right so that’s a great way to study it
00:13:17 ►
and you also get exposed to the to the one of the few branches of science where
00:13:22 ►
people can talk about uh cannabinoids as medicine
00:13:26 ►
and not get laughed out of the place how many of your patients come to you and they’ve heard
00:13:30 ►
about cannabis for severe childhood epilepsy and things like that so i can give i couldn’t give a
00:13:35 ►
number i can say the number is increasing i can say that um you know the what’s interesting is
00:13:41 ►
we’re at a we’re at a forefront for this conversation and we’re at a forefront for this conversation.
00:13:45 ►
And we’re at the forefront for two reasons.
00:13:47 ►
And when I give talks to patient advocacy groups or the groups of parents of children with epilepsy or, for that matter, even just like normal or legalization groups that have nothing to do with medicine but it gets brought up.
00:14:03 ►
Or when I give talks to physicians that have nothing to do with medicine, but it gets brought up. Or when I give talks to physicians that have nothing to do with cannabis,
00:14:06 ►
I say the same thing. And when I say, if you’re a doctor who thinks that cannabis has no medical
00:14:13 ►
use, you’re wrong. And if you’re a patient that thinks cannabis has no medical side effects,
00:14:18 ►
you’re wrong. You know, if you’re just saying, well, it definitely cures cancer. No, I don’t
00:14:22 ►
know whether it might sometimes for something, but it’s not true that it definitely does cure cancer.
00:14:26 ►
And so the question that you’re asking, it’s a very interesting interface.
00:14:33 ►
So it’s very, very common for the parents of children with epilepsy that’s not well controlled by other medications to bring up cannabis at some point.
00:14:41 ►
It’s far more common out here in the West and in Colorado and California than it was where I trained in Kansas City.
00:14:47 ►
But even then, it would be brought up.
00:14:50 ►
What’s hard, and you mentioned about not laughing people about it,
00:14:54 ►
it’s not crazy to bring it up.
00:14:56 ►
But what’s hard is it’s getting harder to filter through what does and doesn’t work. And so there is a big professional organization behind promoting
00:15:10 ►
cannabis as medical use, even in places where it has no business being promoted for that.
00:15:16 ►
And so it probably is true that cannabis has good medical utility
00:15:25 ►
for certain kinds of genetic epilepsy, Gervais syndrome, Deuce syndrome, West syndrome,
00:15:29 ►
in that it is useful to have the conversation about that drug the same way we do about the
00:15:35 ►
other drugs, many of which don’t work, that are FDA approved. It’s absolutely useful to have the
00:15:40 ►
conversation about that drug. And I would go so far as to say that in places where it’s
00:15:45 ►
medically allowed, responsible neurologists are having that conversation, even if the conversation
00:15:51 ►
is about why we shouldn’t try it yet. What’s hard is when patients are bringing up that they want to
00:15:58 ►
try it instead of trying another drug that we definitely know works. And that’s the hard part.
00:16:06 ►
You know, if a patient brings up to me,
00:16:08 ►
hey, doc, I want to try cannabis.
00:16:11 ►
First question I have for is, how much do you want to try?
00:16:13 ►
In what form?
00:16:15 ►
How often?
00:16:16 ►
What will we decide failure looks like, et cetera?
00:16:19 ►
And they never have answers to that questions.
00:16:21 ►
And I can’t medically, ethically, responsibly say,
00:16:24 ►
well, in that case,
00:16:27 ►
I’ll just make something up and see how it works for you. That’s, that’s not okay. The basic
00:16:32 ►
question is, if I do that, and the patient has a life threatening event, whose fault is it? Right?
00:16:38 ►
And it’s not a matter of being sued. This person’s coming to me for help, and I’m trying to take care
00:16:42 ►
of them. Now, when they come to me, and they’ve got a young child with a medically intractable genetic epilepsy, for which
00:16:49 ►
I know many of the drugs either don’t work or they do work, but the kid is so sedated, they don’t
00:16:53 ►
have their baby back. Now we’re having a different conversation about lifestyle management. That’s a
00:17:01 ►
form of palliative care that I think everyone deserves and has the right to have the conversation.
00:17:08 ►
Because I don’t know that something will work better.
00:17:15 ►
But if you had epilepsy, Lex, and you have two or three seizures a year, that’s a problem, right?
00:17:18 ►
If you have a seizure, you can’t drive for three months, you can’t take care of your family,
00:17:19 ►
six months in some other places, that’s a big deal.
00:17:21 ►
It can change your life for you to have a seizure.
00:17:23 ►
You can crash your car, it could kill somebody.
00:17:23 ►
It’s a big deal. But if a small dose of a medication that has nearly no side effects would definitely
00:17:31 ►
prevent you from having seizures, and it’s been three years, and we give you on a trial and the
00:17:35 ►
medication takes it away and you have a seizure again, we put you back on the medication. You say,
00:17:38 ►
well, I want to try cannabis instead. I do think the conversation at that point should be,
00:17:44 ►
well, here’s the risks.
00:17:45 ►
If you have seizures, will you be okay with that?
00:17:48 ►
Because you might.
00:17:51 ►
That’s your right to choose that.
00:17:53 ►
But what’s hard is a doctor doesn’t have a dosage profile that they know works, that they can try,
00:17:59 ►
which means they’re just out in wild, wild west territory.
00:18:02 ►
which means they’re just out in wild, wild west territory.
00:18:09 ►
And that is an extremely difficult medically ethical question for a physician whose first prerogative is to do no harm.
00:18:13 ►
And so I think it’s important that this stuff gets brought up.
00:18:16 ►
I do think people are asking about it more
00:18:18 ►
because they’re less at risk for being kicked out of practices
00:18:21 ►
and stuff like that for it.
00:18:22 ►
I think that’s the important thing.
00:18:23 ►
of script being kicked out of practices and stuff like that for it. I think that’s, I think that’s the important thing. Um, um, the approach I have first is, you know, are we dealing with something
00:18:31 ►
that is likely to work for you and what is the actual method that you want to try? Um, I think
00:18:37 ►
as long as we do that, the, the chance of harm is pretty low when it comes to having conversations,
00:18:41 ►
when it comes to actually testing it, it’s a very different story. And that’s why we do not have positive evidence
00:18:47 ►
for the use of cannabinoids in adults yet.
00:18:51 ►
That day might come. It’s just not here yet.
00:18:54 ►
Though I suspect in here some patient advocates
00:18:57 ►
thinking that for the side effects from most of these medications,
00:19:03 ►
that maybe for kids you’d say
00:19:05 ►
CBD would be a safer alternative to be trying than some of the other anti-epileptic medications.
00:19:13 ►
So the question was, is CBD safer than other anti-epileptic medications?
00:19:19 ►
I just know that I know a bunch of advocates who would be sure it is and would say that it’s
00:19:24 ►
irresponsible as physicians to be starting with other medications that probably have more side effects than CBD does.
00:19:30 ►
I have heard that said to me several times.
00:19:33 ►
That’s what I wanted to ask.
00:19:34 ►
Yeah.
00:19:35 ►
I don’t necessarily believe it, but I wanted to ask it.
00:19:36 ►
So here’s what I can tell you.
00:19:38 ►
So that’s a convenient position to hold when the one who suffers the consequences isn’t you.
00:19:45 ►
position to hold when the one who suffers the consequences isn’t you. And so I have had patient advocates say that to me, who do not actually themselves have a child that is being treated
00:19:51 ►
for this. And I have had this conversation absolutely with parents who do. I have had it
00:19:55 ►
said to me, can we start with this instead? At which point the conversation then, I mean,
00:20:01 ►
when I was in Kansas City, it was moot because it wasn’t something that we could do in missouri you can actually get cbd it’s very hard but you can do it it is legal
00:20:08 ►
um so the the basic question then is how you know how long do you want to try it where if it doesn’t
00:20:15 ►
work you would move to another medication right that’s a fair question and that’s an informed
00:20:20 ►
consent that’s something they should do so there was something said in that statement that does not have side effects.
00:20:27 ►
So the actual numbers for CBD, and I’m going to quote this poorly.
00:20:31 ►
Davinsky’s got a great article on this subject that came out this past year.
00:20:34 ►
Davinsky’s the director of epilepsy at NYU.
00:20:36 ►
He’s one of the hardest working brains we’ve got on this subject.
00:20:41 ►
And they took several hundred patients who had been given this for a various number of
00:20:46 ►
reasons usually for the syndromes I described Gervais-Deuce-Gervais syndrome I think is the
00:20:50 ►
kind that Charlotte had of Charlotte’s Web I’m fairly sure that it might might have been West
00:20:54 ►
and these are bad epilepsies drugs don’t they’re they’re rough well there was a high percentage
00:21:03 ►
of children who had what are called serious side effects
00:21:05 ►
and they didn’t know the average number of drugs these kids were already on was like four drugs
00:21:11 ►
they were already on but the way they did the study was nothing else had changed so that the
00:21:15 ►
issue was the side effect was attributable to the cbd all right so it’s so what i’m getting at is
00:21:21 ►
it is not true to say that there are not a potential serious side effects.
00:21:27 ►
And the problem is that until we have, you know, right now we’ve got a case series of like a few hundred patients.
00:21:34 ►
Until we have 10,000 and until we do a real clinical trial, I don’t know what they are.
00:21:40 ►
That’s not a reason not to try it.
00:21:41 ►
So let me talk a little bit about what the side effects are.
00:21:43 ►
Most common side effects are reported as somnolence. All right. So it, uh, that, that,
00:21:48 ►
that the kids are tired and dragged out and it can be often said, well, they’re also on benzos.
00:21:53 ►
They’re also on other things. All right. That’s fair. Most common serious side effect was
00:21:56 ►
anaphylaxis. That’s a big deal. All right. That’s an allergic reaction. Now that was not very common
00:22:02 ►
by the way. That was like 10, 12% made it might
00:22:05 ►
have been less than that. And and I may have been misquoting that it might have been just a strong
00:22:10 ►
inflammatory allergic reaction might not have an actual anaphylaxis like they didn’t have to give
00:22:13 ►
epi. But that’s a big deal. Here’s the thing probably wasn’t the CBD, it probably was the
00:22:18 ►
nut oil or something like that, that it was suspended in probably wasn’t the actual CBD. So that’s fair, right? So but how many parents when they buy CBD oil, no, and can tell me that they know that thing
00:22:31 ►
was not put together on a line that had some kind of thing that they could have an allergy to they
00:22:35 ►
don’t because then the quality quality control. So, you know, that doesn’t mean don’t use CBD.
00:22:41 ►
It just means that if you’re asking me as a physician, what should I start with?
00:22:45 ►
I am unqualified to know which oil is supposed to be the one I could try to use because I don’t have a system set up where someone has already determined it’s safe.
00:22:54 ►
And if I give it to your kid and that person is intubated in the hospital in three days, whose fault is that?
00:22:59 ►
That’s my fault.
00:23:00 ►
I did that to your kid, right?
00:23:03 ►
That’s a nightmare.
00:23:04 ►
And so when an advocate says that to me,
00:23:07 ►
I want to make sure we have that conversation. Other common side effects are blood pressure
00:23:12 ►
drop, not necessarily in a serious way, but it’s a drop. Blood pressure drop, you know, CBD, I get
00:23:19 ►
said to me has effects on blood pressure. Okay, I can’t tell you what they are exactly. But I can
00:23:23 ►
tell you, the blood pressure goes down
00:23:25 ►
for about an hour after they take it.
00:23:26 ►
It’s probably the CBD.
00:23:28 ►
Not in everybody, but it’s a thing that was reported.
00:23:30 ►
Okay, you ever stand up too fast and get lightheaded?
00:23:32 ►
That’s a blood pressure drop.
00:23:34 ►
If your kid stands up and bounces his head off a corner
00:23:36 ►
because their blood pressure dropped too fast
00:23:37 ►
and they passed out, whose fault is that?
00:23:39 ►
What’s the measure?
00:23:39 ►
What’s the number?
00:23:40 ►
How much can you do it?
00:23:41 ►
What’s the safe amount for a toddler?
00:23:42 ►
I don’t know.
00:23:44 ►
So that’s something just to keep in mind. It doesn’t mean don’t do it. It doesn’t mean don’t
00:23:48 ►
do it. It just means that when I use Lamictal, another popular medication, I know those side
00:23:52 ►
effects more. That’s all. This will come in time, by the way, with more use. I think the solution
00:23:58 ►
to this is just more careful use. I would argue it should be done under a research protocol.
00:24:03 ►
Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. And the other harm reduction thing I always like to try to mention,
00:24:07 ►
because I don’t see it said enough, is that CBD has been shown to stop an enzyme in the liver
00:24:13 ►
that’s important for breaking down drugs, the CYP450.
00:24:17 ►
Fantastic point. I’m glad you brought it up.
00:24:19 ►
Yeah. And the main thing, you know, if you, and I know it sounds esoteric, but really,
00:24:23 ►
if you have someone who’s on a medication where they’re not supposed to be drinking grapefruit juice, that grapefruit juice also breaks down this enzyme.
00:24:31 ►
So if you’re on that kind of medication, you should be careful taking that much CBD because it could be that the drug is not getting broken down to what it should be or the drug is not getting broken down.
00:24:39 ►
It’s building up in your system, and it’s a piece of harm reduction people don’t talk about enough around the cannabis that’s why i’m so glad you brought it up you know um because it’s again it’s
00:24:50 ►
it’s just something to know but there’s also different sub factors for cyp and so there are
00:24:56 ►
definitely drugs that can inhibit the amount of only i’ll give it like like lamictal or something
00:25:03 ►
like that and there are others that actually induce it. So it’s less, there’s less of the drug in your system. So it might be overdose,
00:25:09 ►
or you might be, it’s like, you’re not taking it. You’re actually inducing the metabolism of that
00:25:12 ►
drug. And all the things you’re saying are reasons why it should be studied more. So we can find
00:25:19 ►
what, how it’s used. The cannabinoids are a relatively new frontier of basic science
00:25:27 ►
receptor work that needs to be done and i am worried about the petri dish for that discovery
00:25:35 ►
being in the lives of living children in the clinic who are going home with i hope the
00:25:43 ►
concentration of oil that it says on the outside, on the inside, because it
00:25:46 ►
isn’t always. You know, it’s not a reason not to do it, but I worry about that being our approach.
00:25:52 ►
When they have terrible diseases like the ones we described, we feel differently about trying
00:25:58 ►
because we kind of know what the landscape looks like based on only what we have and any
00:26:03 ►
improvement for some is an improvement. That’s why people are petitioning for compassionate use exemptions for
00:26:10 ►
things like CBD. Um, and that’s why, frankly, why states have allowed it. Um, that’s, that’s,
00:26:17 ►
that’s the reason why. Um, but generally speaking to run headlong is not a harm reduction strategy.
00:26:26 ►
It’s not even a risk averse strategy.
00:26:28 ►
I would say it’s, it’s dangerous.
00:26:30 ►
Yeah.
00:26:31 ►
Yeah.
00:26:31 ►
But it’s worth having the conversation for every person.
00:26:34 ►
That makes sense.
00:26:35 ►
I just hope that they talk to me about it.
00:26:37 ►
Yeah.
00:26:37 ►
Cause I’m not even necessarily going to talk somebody out of it.
00:26:39 ►
In fact, sometimes a patient comes to me and says, Hey doc, just so you know, I’m, I’m
00:26:43 ►
using medical cannabis for my ulcers.
00:26:45 ►
Here’s my card. This is what I use it for because they’re an epilepsy patient who also does this.
00:26:48 ►
But couldn’t I also up my dose and not take this anti epileptic drug?
00:26:54 ►
You know, and so that’s a conversation that should be had.
00:26:58 ►
And what I’m glad is that at least the words getting out that that’s a conversation they should have with their doctor.
00:27:03 ►
the words getting out that that’s the conversation they should have with their doctor.
00:27:09 ►
And that actually brings me to the last topic I wanted to talk over with you about your advocacy out there,
00:27:12 ►
doing grand rounds, talking to other doctors,
00:27:18 ►
who are a notoriously conservative group when it comes to drugs that are deemed illegal,
00:27:20 ►
even though there might be some efficacy there.
00:27:25 ►
What has been effective for you as you talk to fellow physicians to help them understand that some of these drugs are worth taking a look at in a different way?
00:27:28 ►
Data, data. I mean, you’re right that they’re conservative, but I would say
00:27:31 ►
most physicians are conservative about doing things that they don’t know works,
00:27:37 ►
regardless of legality. They’re nervous about doing harm because it’s their responsibility.
00:27:44 ►
And for most people, that’s not even lawsuits we’re talking about.
00:27:46 ►
We’re just talking about doing right by their patients.
00:27:50 ►
So the thing that’s most effective is data.
00:27:54 ►
There was a big study done by David Gloss a few years ago.
00:28:00 ►
I think it was in animal neurology.
00:28:02 ►
It might have been just in neurology.
00:28:03 ►
But about just kind of a systematic review
00:28:07 ►
of all the papers on cannabis.
00:28:10 ►
Gary Gronseth was the last author on that.
00:28:13 ►
And it was, here’s what we’ve got.
00:28:15 ►
It was everything that I either described,
00:28:17 ►
THC or cannabis, things like that.
00:28:19 ►
And it provided good information.
00:28:23 ►
The best data, which is to say level one randomized control trials where it was done in patients,
00:28:29 ►
the best data was for subjective patient reporting of spasticity in people at MS.
00:28:35 ►
And the thing that the doctors will say to me when I bring that up is, yeah, well, they were subjective.
00:28:39 ►
They’re just high.
00:28:40 ►
And my point is, well, you prescribe things for their subjective utility like Benadryl for headaches all the time.
00:28:50 ►
Why do you care?
00:28:51 ►
If they say it makes them feel better and their self-reported disability score is lower, they’re telling you that their quality of life is better and there’s a quality of life measure.
00:28:59 ►
And that point seems to resonate with people.
00:29:01 ►
We have good randomized control data on this particular method.
00:29:04 ►
And you already do this
00:29:06 ►
stuff elsewise in your practice for other things you have no problem for.
00:29:09 ►
Why are you making it a problem just because it happens to have the word cannabis in it
00:29:13 ►
when you’ve got no problem doing that for Benadryl?
00:29:16 ►
You’ve got no problem doing that for off-label use for Haldol for sleep.
00:29:18 ►
Are you kidding me?
00:29:20 ►
You have no problem doing that just because there’s this piece of paper somewhere.
00:29:25 ►
There’s plenty of perfectly legitimate reasons to use medical caution with cannabis. And that’s the
00:29:28 ►
name of my talk usually is medical caution and cannabis use. There’s plenty of perfectly good
00:29:31 ►
reason of caution, but that’s not a good reason. And so data is helping and data, data helps
00:29:38 ►
resonate. It also helps resonate on the other side. When someone does come to me and say, it’s definitely
00:29:46 ►
the right thing. And I say, well, show me your data. It’s definitely the right thing for cancer.
00:29:51 ►
It’s definitely the right thing for this. And I say, show me your data. And we go through it.
00:29:54 ►
The data isn’t there. I have a PhD in epidemiology. I don’t know everything about all data,
00:29:58 ►
but on this subject, I know more than many. And so I know what the data says and it also helps patients be more understanding
00:30:05 ►
about why I wouldn’t lead with that drug in them
00:30:09 ►
and it might be more of a conversation.
00:30:11 ►
It also helps bring the walls down, I think on both sides.
00:30:14 ►
Well, I think that’s great for today.
00:30:16 ►
I really appreciate your take on being a doctor out there
00:30:19 ►
advocating for reasonable use.
00:30:22 ►
I’m advocating for absolutely medic, uh, reasonable medical
00:30:26 ►
caution in use, but also, um, just because we’re unsure, we’re not ready. I don’t think that’s a
00:30:32 ►
reason not to do it. You know, I think informed consent to me is the most important thing.
00:30:37 ►
And I think somebody has a right to do whatever they want to do with themselves and their own
00:30:41 ►
body. Um, in the medical community, it’s a little tough because people listen to people in white coats.
00:30:47 ►
But I think there’s plenty of perfectly good reasons
00:30:51 ►
to be aware of doing things,
00:30:54 ►
and ignorance shouldn’t be the only reason.
00:30:57 ►
Yeah, that makes sense.
00:30:59 ►
And actually, I shouldn’t let you get away with asking
00:31:01 ►
one of my favorite final questions,
00:31:03 ►
which is if you were in charge of how the laws around these things, either if you were a chief at NIDA or chief in a medical school or got to roll out the scheduling system, what would you want to see the most as a physician in the law? The summary statement of that paper I discussed from the AAN by Gloss and Gronseth included in it basically a position statement from the American Academy of Neurology.
00:31:33 ►
And the position statement from the American Academy of Neurology, of which I am a member, is that cannabis should not be Schedule I.
00:31:42 ►
It is not true that it has no medical use, which is the definition of schedule one. Um, there’s, there is no professional organ, medical organization of
00:31:50 ►
physicians that says it has no medical use. Um, even the American Academy of Pediatrics,
00:31:54 ►
the American Medical Association, we all have a position on this and that is that it should not
00:31:57 ►
be schedule one. Um, I don’t, what’s hard is that the way that we schedule the law, the legal method is not the
00:32:07 ►
way that if I was in charge of things that I would, um, do it because cannabis is not one drug.
00:32:13 ►
And so it’s a little silly to talk about how I would schedule cannabis because there are things
00:32:17 ►
in cannabis that shouldn’t be scheduled at all. And there are things in cannabis that should be
00:32:20 ►
scheduled given the fact that the scheduling system happens to exist anyway. I think we have a different conversation about whether it should, but it does.
00:32:27 ►
So, you know, THC, I would leave on the scheduling list.
00:32:30 ►
I wouldn’t leave it schedule one, but it would still be in there because it’s psychoactive.
00:32:34 ►
And if, you know, if Prozac is going to be scheduled, then THC should be.
00:32:41 ►
But I would isolate the chemicals.
00:32:42 ►
And we’re not dealing with the chemical, we’re dealing with a plant.
00:32:44 ►
And that’s one of the chemical, we’re dealing with a plant. And that’s the problem.
00:32:45 ►
That’s one of the problems too.
00:32:47 ►
Um, but so I’m not sure if that answers your question.
00:32:53 ►
I mean, for starters, it shouldn’t be schedule one, but that’s an easy, that’s hardly a
00:32:57 ►
controversial position to hold these days.
00:32:58 ►
I, the challenge I find is people saying that it should remain schedule one.
00:33:02 ►
Um, and the only arguments i hear are
00:33:06 ►
poor ones about addiction and slippery slope and nonsense yeah um as far as i mean the thing the
00:33:14 ►
thing about is once you make it schedule two a lot of the other things we’re talking about change
00:33:18 ►
because now you now there’s it’s very difficult to fund a clinical trial when you’re not sure if
00:33:24 ►
you’ll be federally charged for it while you’re doing it right and so it’s that’s once it’s very difficult to fund a clinical trial when you’re not sure if you’ll be federally charged for it while you’re doing it.
00:33:26 ►
Right. And so it’s that’s once it’s scheduled to and you’ve isolated the thing that someone can make a medication out of to actually dose test.
00:33:36 ►
You can’t run a clinical trial in any sensible way.
00:33:39 ►
If you have varying amounts of terpene, CBD, THC and different ingestion.
00:33:44 ►
There’s no you would never want to. I would never I would never run a clinical trial for blood pressure medication.
00:33:47 ►
I’m certainly not going to do something that affects the brain.
00:33:50 ►
But if I had my druthers, I would just make it so we could control for safety the way we would anything else.
00:33:58 ►
We use arsenic in chemotherapy.
00:34:01 ►
We use platinum that can kill you.
00:34:03 ►
We just control the dosage.
00:34:05 ►
Control the method uh and in fact you’ve actually seen the controlled nida federal government weed a time or two
00:34:12 ►
correct yeah i have seen g13 i have seen it um it’s i don’t think it’s really called that it’s
00:34:17 ►
just called the university of mississippi’s you know new shipment whatever uh yeah yeah i worked
00:34:21 ►
at nida and um i saw it while I was there. And,
00:34:25 ►
um, and I remember, so what I remember was when I was in high school and college hearing the legend
00:34:30 ►
of G13 American beauty came out, they talked about G13 and how it was this incredible thing.
00:34:35 ►
And then I actually saw it and it was like, that looks like dirty brick weed. What is that? Um,
00:34:41 ►
and interestingly, I just met someone. I forget her name escapes me at the moment um who’s at
00:34:47 ►
wash u st lou who was doing a study on quality control testing using the official the dea um
00:34:54 ►
using this strain and what she was doing was just testing what they got and finding how much
00:34:59 ►
mold was in it and the variability in thc content was all over the place and what was really
00:35:05 ►
frustrating for her was she had permission to do cannabis studies and she wouldn’t use it because
00:35:11 ►
she felt like it didn’t meet her quality standards do a really controlled trial that’s really
00:35:16 ►
frustrating it’s extremely frustrating it’s frustrating for researchers um so yeah i i’ve
00:35:22 ►
seen it and i’m underwhelmed. All right.
00:35:25 ►
We’ll leave it at that.
00:35:26 ►
Dr. Matt, underwhelmed with Nidus weed.
00:35:30 ►
Thank you so much for your work out there, letting people know.
00:35:33 ►
Yeah, you bet.
00:35:33 ►
Yeah, and it’s been a pleasure to talk today.
00:35:35 ►
It’s been a pleasure.
00:35:35 ►
Nice meeting you.
00:35:35 ►
Take care.
00:35:36 ►
All right.
00:35:36 ►
Cheers.
00:35:41 ►
We are here with Frank Sacco who works with the virtual healing community. And he’s here to tell us more about how that started and how he came to it.
00:35:50 ►
Hello, everybody. It’s a pleasure to be here today.
00:35:53 ►
Awesome. Thanks for taking the time to talk to us.
00:35:56 ►
So how did the virtual healing community come about?
00:36:00 ►
All right. So just to give you a little bit of background, so I’m finishing my last year of doctoral studies in psychology.
00:36:07 ►
My father has been a psychologist now for over 45 years.
00:36:12 ►
And a lot of his early, early research really began in studying the altered state of consciousness
00:36:17 ►
through a lot of the experts in the field, such as Stanley Krippner and Stuart Trumwell.
00:36:23 ►
And so him and I, we’re like the same.
00:36:25 ►
You know, we have like the same mind.
00:36:27 ►
And it’s quite interesting because, you know, now he’s entering, he’s getting close to 70s now.
00:36:34 ►
But, you know, it’s really truly amazing that he has been faced with a lot of personal adversity.
00:36:41 ►
He spent most of his career after really studying the
00:36:45 ►
altered states of consciousness, really looking at violence prevention and
00:36:51 ►
looking at that not only through the lens of bullying, but also through the
00:36:55 ►
lens of international research. And he has consulted with the FBI. And so I’ve
00:37:00 ►
gotten to tag along with him for a lot of really cool experiences. And now as he gets towards the end of his career, and he’s a little bit later in his life,
00:37:09 ►
we’ve been really faced with some really tremendous adversity,
00:37:14 ►
especially my father is currently going through his second bout of cancer treatment.
00:37:19 ►
And this is where we really kind of spawned the idea.
00:37:23 ►
We had a lot of time.
00:37:24 ►
He also sustained an injury on his hip where he could no longer walk.
00:37:29 ►
So we’re like, oh, God, things couldn’t get any worse.
00:37:31 ►
Now, you know, he has to not only go through cancer treatment, but he also has to do it without the ability to walk.
00:37:37 ►
And so we’ve been facing a lot of adversity.
00:37:40 ►
And, you know, I’m living in the Boston area.
00:37:42 ►
So he had to get treatment in the Boston area.
00:37:44 ►
So him and I would sit down every day and we would talk. And so it was interesting.
00:37:49 ►
He has now returned back to his he’s always been a humanist, you know, humanistic psychologist at heart.
00:37:54 ►
But now we want to really kind of return back to a lot of the research that he’s done in the altered state of consciousness.
00:38:08 ►
altered state of consciousness and which really kind of spawned the conversation that, you know,
00:38:13 ►
you know, and he has used medical cannabis now, not only for his cancer treatment, but,
00:38:19 ►
you know, for a majority of his life. So he’s a proponent of it. And as am I. And so we were talking and we were really, really, really saying that, you know, when somebody goes to the dispensary, you know, who really tells them what to do with it?
00:38:28 ►
And so it was quite amazing.
00:38:30 ►
And we’re like, well, that’s a good question.
00:38:32 ►
And so we decided to really come up with a method, which is called the cannabis healing method, which is using the, how do you really navigate the altered state of consciousness to self-heal?
00:38:44 ►
How do you become your own therapist? How do you become your own therapist?
00:38:46 ►
How do you become your own healer and guide?
00:38:49 ►
So we were talking about this, and then it was like the ideas were flying.
00:38:53 ►
He was up at all times of the night writing notes,
00:38:56 ►
and we bought like a basic recorder, and we started recording episodes.
00:39:00 ►
And, you know, every day that I would go and visit him in the rehab,
00:39:03 ►
you know, we would see if we can go reserve a room and do a recording.
00:39:06 ►
And it was a great way to keep his mind really sharp and focused.
00:39:10 ►
And we’re getting all these really amazing, amazing ideas.
00:39:13 ►
So that’s really where virtual healing communities, you know, started.
00:39:16 ►
So, you know, it was quite fascinating because it was a really challenging time in our lives.
00:39:23 ►
But this was actually a way for us to really kind of keep our mind focused on a goal.
00:39:29 ►
And so now what has really kind of opened up is this really cool methodology
00:39:35 ►
for medical cannabis patients.
00:39:39 ►
Wow. He’s lucky to have you.
00:39:42 ►
And you’re lucky to have such a great way to learn.
00:39:44 ►
So as you were talking there, how did the cannabis healing method develop?
00:39:49 ►
What parts immediately became clear they were really important?
00:39:53 ►
You know, there’s a lot of important, mostly in our mind.
00:39:57 ►
You know, it’s easy for the seasoned, you know, cannabis users to know how much they need, right,
00:40:05 ►
how much they need to smoke.
00:40:06 ►
But sometimes for those who are maybe they’re, you know,
00:40:10 ►
receiving cancer treatment or maybe they have chronic pain,
00:40:13 ►
they have exhausted all medical options,
00:40:15 ►
they don’t want to try any psychopharm, you know, and cannabis,
00:40:18 ►
and they’re really going to cannabis.
00:40:20 ►
And we really truly believe that cannabis is a healing medicine, you know.
00:40:24 ►
So how do we actually provide a structure for that person to be able to find the right
00:40:31 ►
dose, to find the right strain?
00:40:35 ►
And we’re really getting into the idea of kind of creating a healing ritual.
00:40:41 ►
So how do you use, rather than, we’re turning it from kind of a passive kind of activity to really kind of
00:40:49 ►
guided and straightforward by using a planning, planning,
00:40:53 ►
ritual planning, a healing ritual, you know,
00:40:56 ►
so exactly where in your home do you do this?
00:40:58 ►
Exactly how much of which strain do you like to use?
00:41:02 ►
It’s a tempering process and like in meditation, it’s how do you like to use? It’s a tempering process. And like in meditation,
00:41:05 ►
it’s how do you set your intention? So even if you’re the most seasoned cannabis user,
00:41:10 ►
maybe you’re using it for creativity, right? So we’re really trying to figure out how do we get
00:41:15 ►
a person to maximize their healing. And we really kind of get into levels of consciousness. That’s
00:41:23 ►
one of our theoretical points, right? So we’re looking of get into levels of consciousness. That’s one of our theoretical points, right?
00:41:25 ►
So we’re looking at the ordinary state of consciousness.
00:41:28 ►
Then we’re going to go down to the personal unconscious, where a lot of, you know,
00:41:32 ►
persons like conflicts are.
00:41:34 ►
That’s where a lot of the emotional entanglement is.
00:41:37 ►
And below that, we really kind of also talk about the collective unconscious,
00:41:42 ►
which is a concept that is written about extensively.
00:41:45 ►
But that’s where the most creativity lies in this kind of connection to the universe,
00:41:53 ►
to everything that has been in existence since the beginning of time.
00:41:57 ►
And you can read about it a ton.
00:41:59 ►
So our methodology is based primarily off of that.
00:42:07 ►
our methodology is based primarily off of that and we use visualizations and meditations and you know to you know which the altered state of consciousness is induced by cannabis and it
00:42:12 ►
also could be induced through yoga and through natural you know meditations and stuff like that
00:42:17 ►
so what we do is we use both and we really try to have the person explore those deeper level
00:42:22 ►
of consciousness to maybe unlock creativity or maybe to work their way through some of those
00:42:26 ►
difficult emotional entanglements.
00:42:29 ►
Because really I think the medical cannabis patient,
00:42:34 ►
unless you have like a really cool therapist, you know,
00:42:36 ►
then you may be able to talk about this, right?
00:42:38 ►
But yet there’s still struggling with theory.
00:42:41 ►
There’s a lot of research that’s going on in the field in being able to use cannabis for PPS treatment in veterans.
00:42:49 ►
I know John Hopkins University is doing a tremendous amount of study,
00:42:53 ►
but the medical cannabis patient is really kind of left on their own.
00:42:56 ►
Nobody has really developed a way to let them know
00:43:00 ►
that they can use this and be followed.
00:43:04 ►
Once the medical cannabis doctor kind of writes the script,
00:43:08 ►
they really kind of keep up with the person.
00:43:11 ►
And so what we want to do is we want to provide a platform where we can help
00:43:14 ►
kind of foster and facilitate a community.
00:43:16 ►
But we also provide a form of psychoeducation that is based off of the
00:43:21 ►
principles in our healing method.
00:43:23 ►
So one of them definitely being the levels of consciousness.
00:43:27 ►
Wow.
00:43:28 ►
So it sounds like people really get to direct their own methodology here,
00:43:33 ►
what works for them.
00:43:34 ►
You’re just giving tools and other people to rely upon, to learn from.
00:43:39 ►
Exactly, because we really believe that not only one, even if you, you know, even if, you know, I’ve done so many psychotherapy sessions, right?
00:43:49 ►
And I really, truly believe in the transformative nature of a psychotherapeutic encounter, right, in person.
00:43:54 ►
So we’re very aware and we talk to people about that line of which maybe you do need to go see, you know, professional help.
00:44:02 ►
Maybe the depression is, when is the depression maybe a little too heavy or when is the trauma maybe a little bit too traumatic where that maybe
00:44:10 ►
self-help isn’t enough. So we understand that, but again, maybe somebody already has an established,
00:44:18 ►
you know, therapist or an established psycho-oncologist, but what we want to do is,
00:44:24 ►
what do you do when you’re home?
00:44:25 ►
There’s a lot of time when you’re sitting at home, and I know this with my dad, we have
00:44:31 ►
a lot of times where, you know, it’s just, all you have to do is kind of ride out, you know,
00:44:37 ►
ride out the intensity of the situation, and all you can think about is the, you know, the intensity
00:44:44 ►
of the illness, and so it’s like, all right, so how do you can think about is the you know the intensity of the illness and and so it’s
00:44:46 ►
like all right so how do you how do you help somebody that is fighting cancer or fighting
00:44:51 ►
chronic pain chronic pain is a big one so and we need to bring we need to we want to provide a
00:44:56 ►
platform that brings it to a person’s home so they never kind of really feel kind of feel alone
00:45:01 ►
that they’re going through this this self-healing journey with uh not only
00:45:05 ►
not only us at virtual healing communities but other members of the community we want to turn
00:45:10 ►
the we want to turn the person into their own healer uh dr stanley critter does an excellent
00:45:16 ►
one called finding your inner shaman um which is which is absolutely fascinating yeah yeah and in
00:45:23 ►
my father does a lot of really cool visualizations called like, one of them is fighting your demons. So whether it’s a, you know, life, you know,
00:45:47 ►
a really intense chronic life-threatening illness, you’ll be faced with fear, right?
00:45:54 ►
Fear of death, right?
00:45:55 ►
Fear of what’s going to happen if you leave your family behind.
00:46:00 ►
So all these things naturally come out of really intense situations.
00:46:03 ►
So my father does visualizations about turning those fears into monsters, right?
00:46:08 ►
And he does a wonderful visualization of him really encountering this monster and being able to use a weapon to kind of defeat this monster.
00:46:30 ►
We’re creating a theater for a person to use their visualization, use their mind to help heal their body and to improve well-being.
00:46:48 ►
Wow. I mean, that just sounds so appealing because it’s not too mystical for a good materialist rationalist to go for that and understand that that would be helpful to have this theater of the mind. I guess I have to ask though, do you get much pushback from more conservative,
00:46:52 ►
leaning therapists and people in the field?
00:46:55 ►
Yeah. See where we draw the line is, is, is, you know,
00:46:59 ►
this is a message that is self-help. So if,
00:47:02 ►
if you are a professional in the field, that’s good.
00:47:06 ►
We want to get your attention because really where it lies is in the research,
00:47:10 ►
like what John Hopkins is doing.
00:47:13 ►
And, you know, coming from the field of psychology,
00:47:16 ►
like research is absolutely essential.
00:47:19 ►
And we know that, you know, from the work that, you know,
00:47:22 ►
MAPS is doing and they’re doing phenomenal work with MDMA-assisted psychotherapy.
00:47:27 ►
You know, it’s a – and anything that they write about that says if you want to get into this field and research in a professional realm, right, that you’re going to face a lot of pushback.
00:47:39 ►
But yet here at Virtual Healing Communities, what we’re really doing is this is self-help.
00:47:43 ►
This is a – we’re teaching, we’re providing the scaffold, and the person is really kind of driving the
00:47:51 ►
process themselves. And what I think is the most important part is that we want people,
00:47:56 ►
part of the visualization studio is that we’ll have guitar loops that create a hypnotic vibe.
00:48:02 ►
We are going to have different soundscapes so that people can download.
00:48:06 ►
Most people have garage pins on their computers, you know,
00:48:08 ►
or have them on their cell phones.
00:48:10 ►
We want you to download a track.
00:48:11 ►
We want you to create your own, and we want you to record it.
00:48:16 ►
And we want you to share it to the community because we really believe in the
00:48:20 ►
healing power of community.
00:48:23 ►
Like, you know, Dr. Kutner talks a lot about, you know,
00:48:26 ►
his research with, you know, native,
00:48:28 ►
different indigenous tribes and Native Americans and the role of the healing
00:48:33 ►
power of community.
00:48:35 ►
And a lot of the healing rituals are done in a community.
00:48:38 ►
And we want to really try to capture that on a virtual platform.
00:48:43 ►
But so I think in kind of back to, you know,
00:48:46 ►
speaking to some people that would push back,
00:48:49 ►
I say it’s encouraged because that will only help us in a more professional
00:48:54 ►
realm to kind of fine tune our research.
00:48:57 ►
But yeah, what we’re doing is more focused on self-help.
00:49:01 ►
And we are not providing medical advice.
00:49:03 ►
So if you go to a dispensary what
00:49:05 ►
what we’re going to do is we have our cannabis technician training of which we want to help
00:49:10 ►
teach some of the the basic concepts the uh the skills and the principles uh to the cannabis
00:49:15 ►
technician to help help that process um but if there’s questions we’re going to have them submit
00:49:21 ►
submit them to to us and we can answer it in a weekly podcast.
00:49:25 ►
So we won’t answer anything directly, but we want to collect as many kind of like a kind of phenomenological research
00:49:32 ►
where you kind of just gather a lot of people’s responses, but also pick out different themes,
00:49:38 ►
and we’re going to answer them in a podcast.
00:49:40 ►
But we really want to make sure that, you know, it’s not a cop-out to say self-help.
00:49:45 ►
I think that it’s actually really important that somebody develops those skills.
00:49:50 ►
And it’s not easy to develop those skills.
00:49:52 ►
And so that’s what we want to help a person do.
00:49:56 ►
Storytelling is data.
00:49:58 ►
Yeah, exactly.
00:50:00 ►
Qualitative.
00:50:01 ►
Yeah, that’s really great.
00:50:03 ►
Now, the focus on community sounds wonderful.
00:50:07 ►
I was curious about other tools used in combination because your website lists such a great range of tools that your father liked using.
00:50:16 ►
Movement, psychotherapy, yoga, tai chi, physical therapy, water aerobics, meditation, self-hypnosis.
00:50:22 ►
water aerobics, meditation, self-hypnosis.
00:50:28 ►
Do you find patients that come in that find certain combinations more often to be helpful for them, combining with cannabis or any of those other techniques?
00:50:33 ►
Yeah.
00:50:33 ►
I think the first that comes to mind is chronic pain.
00:50:37 ►
I remember working with a patient who was 45 years old, came in for psychotherapy.
00:50:49 ►
But, you know, early in his 20s, he fell from a scaffold and actually suffered a back injury.
00:50:53 ►
And so me, myself, I have my own back surgery,
00:50:58 ►
so I understand that intensity of that chronic pain.
00:51:02 ►
But he has now experienced it, you know, every day since that,
00:51:05 ►
that injury. And so he, you know, sometimes you would actually have to lay down flat on the,
00:51:09 ►
on the floor before a psychotherapy session. But, you know, he is a person that it’s interesting.
00:51:15 ►
So everything, it doesn’t happen in isolation, right? So, you know, of course you have chronic
00:51:19 ►
pain, but what do you use to treat chronic pain? Right. So, of course, you know, he’s actually had to, you know, use painkillers,
00:51:28 ►
which ended up getting to a problematic zone, and he was able to help.
00:51:33 ►
This was before I actually met him.
00:51:34 ►
He was able to use, you know, methadone to get it to a control level.
00:51:38 ►
Then he was like, I also use cannabis, you know?
00:51:41 ►
And so I think that’s, you know, it’s a perfect example that chronic pain is often treated with, you know and so i think that’s you know it’s a perfect example that that chronic pain is is uh
00:51:46 ►
is often treated with with uh you know with with uh painkillers but this this person naturally
00:51:53 ►
sought out cannabis they were using cannabis and you know i really encouraged that but what i was
00:51:58 ►
really trying to get him to do was to go into the pool you you know, because for people that have chronic pain, or that have fibromyalgia, neuropathy, that nerve pain, or any type of spinal injury,
00:52:13 ►
water aerobics is absolutely phenomenal.
00:52:17 ►
And if you look, you know, dance, drum, anything that involves movement, I mean,
00:52:22 ►
before, you know, that’s like the first thing to develop before any organized religion and before anything.
00:52:29 ►
Dancing and drumming is at the core, you know, of human existence.
00:52:34 ►
So if you’re able to stimulate some of those, it’s actually considered a chakra point, you know.
00:52:40 ►
And we also kind of talked a little bit about different shock points as well. But that’s one of the lowest shocker points is when, you know, movement and dance and rhythm.
00:52:49 ►
And, you know, it’s so I think that the first thing that comes to my mind is, you know,
00:52:55 ►
because movement, dance and, you know, martial arts, it creates a natural state of consciousness.
00:53:01 ►
If you ever if you’re a martial artist and you ever done a kata, you know, it’s a series and sequence of movements that kind of gets you in a, in a
00:53:08 ►
hypnotic state where your mind and body just like become one. We talk a lot about the mind-body
00:53:13 ►
connection, you know, how to, you know, sometimes the mind gets really overloaded, maybe with
00:53:18 ►
anxiety, or maybe the body gets really overloaded with chronic pain. So how do we use self-hypnosis
00:53:23 ►
and the altered state of consciousness to
00:53:25 ►
balance that out?
00:53:26 ►
But we really think that those activities in themselves can create an altered
00:53:31 ►
state of consciousness.
00:53:32 ►
And the people don’t realize we really want to get people to be familiar with
00:53:35 ►
that term, the altered state of consciousness,
00:53:39 ►
that you can achieve it through, you know, meditation.
00:53:43 ►
You can’t achieve it through natural ways,
00:53:45 ►
but we want to be able to help people that are struggling a little bit more
00:53:49 ►
to induce that alternative consciousness with cannabis.
00:53:52 ►
And it’s also paired very nicely with martial arts and more body-based movement.
00:53:58 ►
Hmm. Oh, that’s beautiful. It makes a lot of sense.
00:54:02 ►
I actually have a friend who is suffering from ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease,
00:54:06 ►
and the absolutely best thing for him, he says, is stoned yoga.
00:54:11 ►
He’s at the six-year mark, which is a good survival rate,
00:54:14 ►
and it’s a little bit of hashish and a little bit of yoga,
00:54:17 ►
and it’s saved him, according to him.
00:54:21 ►
You know, and so hearing these stories, they really, like, it gives me a little goose bumps, you know, and so hearing these stories, they really like, it gives me a little goose bumps, you know, because what we would love, you know, for him to do is to tell his story, you know, like we want to provide a platform where he like, we’re not originally encourage people connecting to um what we
00:55:06 ►
do in you know in our audio book is really um we want people to create a ritual in their home and
00:55:12 ►
to dive deep internal it’s an internal journey and exploration of deeper levels of consciousness
00:55:18 ►
but then we want people to go out into the external world and be able to to explore and
00:55:23 ►
try new paths try new things things, try new experiences.
00:55:27 ►
But to hear your friend’s story like that,
00:55:29 ►
it’s a perfect example of how I would love for him to write about that.
00:55:33 ►
And that’s why we want to provide a space for people to kind of reflect,
00:55:36 ►
tell their story, and write and share.
00:55:39 ►
That’s great.
00:55:40 ►
So if anyone listening wants to share their stories, what works for them,
00:55:43 ►
virtual healing community is the place to do it.
00:55:46 ►
Now, I wanted to ask you a little bit about your story.
00:55:49 ►
I mean, because this for someone pursuing a doctorate in clinical psychology, this stuff is pretty far out there.
00:55:55 ►
What was it like? I mean, being a young person with a dad like Dr.
00:56:01 ►
Sacco taking all these, you know, pretty out there modalities. What was your
00:56:06 ►
relationship to these altered states of consciousness and these types of drugs,
00:56:11 ►
you know, seeing it from the very early ages? Yeah. So, I mean, you know, some of my father’s
00:56:18 ►
early research was actually in Jamaica, and it was a violence prevention program in the Sheffield and Negril
00:56:25 ►
all-age schools. And it was an amazing experience. And I have a lot of experience, you know,
00:56:32 ►
in global mental health. And this year, I just got back from Haiti as well with my group of
00:56:38 ►
graduate students. And it’s kind of funny. It’s walking a it’s walking a fine line.
00:56:45 ►
I think that you have to you have to kind of monitor what what you’re saying, you know, because, you know, I have really radical views.
00:56:54 ►
But, you know, you know, when when you’re in a kind of fairly conservative institution, you know, only a small percentage might share those views.
00:57:07 ►
But I think that, you know, as of currently right now, you know, I think that I would be in the
00:57:14 ►
minority who would agree with it. But it’s something that I will, it’s interesting, though,
00:57:20 ►
because you see that on a larger scale, right? You look how hard it is to actually do any research in this field.
00:57:27 ►
It’s like for those who have the courage and the passion to use, you know, psychedelics and psychotherapy and, you know, it takes a long, arduous journey and you will be in the minority.
00:57:41 ►
You will face more conservatives.
00:57:43 ►
But, you know, I think that that’s what makes her a good scientist
00:57:46 ►
is who’s
00:57:48 ►
pushing back. But from my personal
00:57:50 ►
experience with my father,
00:57:52 ►
we would go to Jamaica
00:57:53 ►
and of course
00:57:56 ►
Ganja is a really big part
00:57:58 ►
of Rastafarianism, so I would learn a lot
00:58:00 ►
about that. And my
00:58:02 ►
personal experience is I’m a huge
00:58:04 ►
fan. I love fish, I love fish.
00:58:06 ►
I love entrees.
00:58:07 ►
And so I love that collective, you know, vibe.
00:58:11 ►
So myself, I’ve, you know, gone to tons of festivals and tons of concerts and had my own experiences, both good and bad.
00:58:19 ►
And really understanding, you know, what those experiences mean.
00:58:22 ►
understanding, you know, what those experiences mean.
00:58:28 ►
And I think some of the most intense experiences that I’ve had has really,
00:58:32 ►
and if you’re going to look at the different levels of consciousness, you know,
00:58:35 ►
it’s the stuff that gets really stuffed down and you push it out of your mind,
00:58:37 ►
whether you’re aware of it or not, right?
00:58:40 ►
And it’s like Bob Marley, it’s like you’re running and you’re running away,
00:58:42 ►
but you can’t run away from yourself. So, and I think that’s what a lot of the research says about using psychedelics
00:58:46 ►
and psychotherapy and, you know, if it’s a life-threatening illness, you know,
00:58:53 ►
how much do you really think about and challenge and to reflect on something
00:58:57 ►
such as scary as that you might not make it through, right?
00:59:01 ►
So the more somebody, you know, kind of pushes that down,
00:59:04 ►
it’s interesting how psychedelics have a way of getting a person opened up.
00:59:09 ►
So, so I think that my personal experiences, both good and bad,
00:59:14 ►
have taught a lot about, have taught me a lot about myself,
00:59:17 ►
but also how these different levels of consciousness work, you know, and,
00:59:22 ►
and it’s, it’s quite and it’s quite interesting.
00:59:25 ►
But as a professional, so I have the personal, which is really kind of marked by, you know,
00:59:30 ►
a lot of really cool, I really love the group consciousness feeling of festivals and concerts
00:59:36 ►
and, you know, or being in, you know, being in a massive, you know, a massive auditorium
00:59:42 ►
with fish.
00:59:42 ►
It feels like you’re in an organ, you know, like one cell.
00:59:44 ►
I love that feeling. So it’s interesting to have those experiences.
00:59:50 ►
But professionally, it’s interesting because it’s in order to do this on a professional level,
00:59:56 ►
you have to really, you have to really kind of work with, you know, with people that are
01:00:02 ►
like-minded and really focused on doing rigorous, really tight research.
01:00:08 ►
Of these drugs that are currently scheduled and no medical value,
01:00:14 ►
if the scheduling system wasn’t there and you could use anything you wanted with your mental health patients,
01:00:19 ►
which of these currently scheduled drugs would be most intriguing for you to be utilizing?
01:00:26 ►
If there was no schedule, it’s interesting because I think it’s different drugs would
01:00:34 ►
call for different cases.
01:00:37 ►
I really think that.
01:00:38 ►
But regardless of what drugs work best with what, I think it has to do with the journey
01:00:44 ►
that it really induces and how one’s able to guide somebody through those.
01:00:49 ►
But I really think that the research being done now with MDMA and trauma is absolutely
01:01:00 ►
fascinating.
01:01:01 ►
And it’s one that would, I would i think really because a lot of people
01:01:06 ►
think that you know what you’re going to prescribe somebody ecstasy and it’s like well quite the
01:01:10 ►
contrary and i think that um you know um i think a lot of uh you know bigger bigger um pharmaceutical
01:01:16 ►
companies might be a little threatened by something that you could you can give maybe once or twice or
01:01:22 ►
in a small you know 12 session uh kind you know, setting that might have more profound, more life-changing effects than maybe something that you would have to keep using, you know, whether it be pharmaceutical.
01:01:37 ►
So I think that it’s really promising research in, you know, what’s being done now, but you can see that it’s hard
01:01:46 ►
to get the research done. And, you know, I think that, you know, I have interest to continue to do
01:01:52 ►
that. But I really think that, you know, I’m really right now currently looking at, you know,
01:01:57 ►
how to really turn the person to their own, you know, healer. And I think that in itself is a challenge
01:02:05 ►
because even
01:02:08 ►
it’s interesting that even no matter what
01:02:10 ►
tools you have at your disposal, it’s how do
01:02:12 ►
you really carve out that time for yourself
01:02:15 ►
and
01:02:16 ►
that’s what we I think really are trying
01:02:18 ►
to do with this idea of planning a healing
01:02:20 ►
ritual. But as for
01:02:23 ►
extra psychotherapy and
01:02:24 ►
I mean I think that
01:02:25 ►
might be something the future that DHC might, you know, really move towards. But right now,
01:02:30 ►
we really want to kind of make it focused on a person developing their own ability to heal
01:02:35 ►
themselves. That’s great. That’s such an important message. And so the last question I wanted to ask is kind of the doctor’s dream if if we gave you
01:02:48 ►
an entire wing of a big hospital and you had the mental health wing of it what how would you like
01:02:56 ►
to see that set up how what kind of rooms would you have what kind of therapies would be standard
01:03:00 ►
what would you like to see if we gave you this big mental health wing? Oh, I love this question because I think about it all the time. First off, I wouldn’t be in a
01:03:08 ►
hospital. Good first answer. Yeah, because I just spent a year at a forensic state hospital,
01:03:18 ►
and it’s a very, very heavy place, you know, where people have done some heavy things.
01:03:26 ►
And you have to work with some pretty scary individuals.
01:03:32 ►
But you really see these places are kind of cold, you know.
01:03:39 ►
And, you know, it’s interesting, right?
01:03:42 ►
It’s when somebody loses their civil liberties.
01:03:41 ►
And, you know, it’s interesting, right?
01:03:44 ►
It’s when somebody loses their civil liberties.
01:03:49 ►
So I think that, you know, that taking it out of a hospital would be my first step. I always thought, like, why can’t, you know, it’s kind of like before deinstitutionalization, you know, in the 60s when a lot of there used to be a lot more hospitals.
01:04:00 ►
And then what ended up happening is they moved towards community mental health.
01:04:10 ►
And then what ended up happening is they moved towards community mental health, and that’s where my father really got started and really developed in-home therapy, bringing the therapy to people’s homes.
01:04:14 ►
But all the hospitals used to kind of be in more rural areas.
01:04:23 ►
And it’s kind of funny that you mention this because what I would choose to do is kind of almost bring it back to the more rural area.
01:04:27 ►
But you’re going to need a lot of the medical staff.
01:04:39 ►
But I think that it’s quite the rooms that I would have, I think, would I think I would let the people really create the rooms themselves.
01:04:45 ►
Because it’s interesting when you get to that point in kind of mental health for the more long-term hospitalizations,
01:04:48 ►
it’s usually it’s like they’re not allowed back in the world.
01:04:51 ►
You know, it’s like things happen and, you know, this is major mental illness.
01:04:55 ►
And, you know, it’s not a person, you know, it’s not really a, you know,
01:05:01 ►
something that is, you know, really kind of seen, right?
01:05:06 ►
It’s kind of like a prison, like how many people really see into that,
01:05:09 ►
but they have the long-term hospital. We have the shorter term hospital,
01:05:12 ►
you know, which is maybe a couple of weeks. So my,
01:05:16 ►
my first thing would be is if somebody needed that level of care,
01:05:19 ►
they’re really, they’re really missing some really crucial things in life.
01:05:23 ►
And right now there’s a, it’s’s very much a medical, you know, using pharmacology
01:05:29 ►
and sometimes like using humanistic psychotherapy.
01:05:33 ►
You can actually get an order to have medication administered
01:05:39 ►
without the person’s consent, which is a core process in itself.
01:05:44 ►
But you can’t have that same process for psychotherapy.
01:05:47 ►
The person can, you know, not want to do psychotherapy and there’s no process.
01:05:52 ►
But, like, sometimes that’s the most powerful, you know,
01:05:56 ►
powerful part of healing is that human connection.
01:06:00 ►
So I think that sometimes in this hospital I would make sure that, like,
01:06:04 ►
true, genuine, humanistic psychotherapy was a part of it, because you see that, you know, sometimes in a medical setting, you know, it’s sometimes a little too medical.
01:06:21 ►
that doesn’t feel like a hospital.
01:06:24 ►
I would really kind of focus on the human connection,
01:06:32 ►
and I would also make sure that it actually is focused on getting the person back to a point where they can really connect with another human being,
01:06:38 ►
which can be some really challenging work with people with major mental illness.
01:06:45 ►
So this conversation, I have a million ideas,
01:06:48 ►
but I really think that that was quite an awesome question
01:06:52 ►
because I really think that, you know, in this field, you know, hospitals,
01:06:59 ►
they’re less and less, but it’s usually for the folks that have really challenging problems.
01:07:07 ►
And, you know, so there’s a lot of work to be done, so to speak.
01:07:13 ►
Yeah.
01:07:13 ►
That is a great rundown.
01:07:15 ►
Thank you.
01:07:16 ►
Well, I know when I have my next mental health crisis, I know where I’d like to come.
01:07:21 ►
Yeah.
01:07:22 ►
Come on over.
01:07:24 ►
Come on over, Yeah. All right. Well, thank you so much for sharing about
01:07:28 ►
your work and your knowledge about it and moving this forward with virtual healing communities and
01:07:33 ►
the cannabis healing method. I appreciate your time so much. All right. Thank you, Lex. It’s
01:07:39 ►
been truly an honor. I really appreciate it. And I hope that, you know, everybody listening
01:07:43 ►
to come check out our website.
01:07:45 ►
We’re really looking to launch here in October.
01:07:49 ►
We’re going to be we’re going to look to go and actually do a presentation.
01:07:52 ►
I would like to present at the Cannabis Expedition coming up in Boston.
01:07:56 ►
We’re Boston based. So it’s nice to be able to officially launch.
01:08:00 ►
We’re in the last few stages of getting everything mixed and mastered and really put together quite nicely for people.
01:08:06 ►
And so we’re looking to really kind of launch in October.
01:08:09 ►
But we have our website.
01:08:10 ►
Come check it out.
01:08:12 ►
And we hope to have you a part of the community because I think that the bigger this community can get, I think the more that people will be able to help each other.
01:08:21 ►
And that’s really what we’re looking at, what we’re really looking to do.
01:08:25 ►
I like to consider,
01:08:26 ►
I consider it organic altruism.
01:08:28 ►
That’s good.
01:08:30 ►
Yeah.
01:08:31 ►
And everybody,
01:08:31 ►
they have,
01:08:31 ►
they have podcasts that are going up.
01:08:33 ►
They have a book already.
01:08:35 ►
Yeah.
01:08:35 ►
It’s already a great spot to be in.
01:08:37 ►
It’s only going to be getting better as they launch.
01:08:38 ►
So thank you so much for sharing about it.
01:08:41 ►
Thank you so much,
01:08:43 ►
Lex.
01:08:43 ►
All right,
01:08:44 ►
cool.
01:08:44 ►
Until next time.
01:08:45 ►
Talk to you soon.